YouTube, Streaming, and the Music Teacher

This is the amazing YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011. A full-fledged symphony orchestra was collected using audition pieces streamed through YouTube by musicians from all over the world. These amazing individuals came to Sydney to perform under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, one of the great conductors of the modern era.

Knowing a little something about things like this is important, I think, for the modern music educator like myself. So often in classical music we get bogged down by tradition. I’ve written before about things like incorporating audio and visual supports for teachers. This is a great extension that can be done on a smaller scale for dispersed, often isolated programs. If you have a suitable Internet connection, it’s possible in today’s day and age to connect audio-visually with any number of other people.

Now, the technology doesn’t really permit me to do cool things like conduct another group from afar. The delays that creep in as the servers reroute high-compression video files make conducting to what you hear nigh-impossible unless you have absolutely lightning quick Internet and the highest quality of video drivers. However, using them to exchange videos with another program is certainly viable.

A lot of programs nowadays do guest workshops where the students are either brought to a group of more experienced specialist musicians to work with, or the clinicians come to them. This has obvious real benefits because of course spending one-on-one instructional time with students while in a band class where you are expected to rehearse as a group is very challenging. However, the cost and logistics of organizing clinics can be prohibitive for some programs.

Imagine instead a Skype music lab: professionals hook up their Skype to a group of students on the other end of a big-screen computer. The sound transmission is fairly good, and all manner of demonstrations of posture or other visual aids to music performance can be accommodated. Again, this is not the ideal format for instruction: having someone in the room to have the most realistic feedback is preferable. But for a program that maybe doesn’t have those few hundred/thousand dollars to bring in clinicians, it could be a quick fix with some interesting networking applications.

Anyhow, the point is not to completely explore what technology like video capture and live streaming can accomplish. People are going to continuously improve these services so that more and more is possible with them. Things like the YouTube Symphony Orchestra would not have been possible even 10 years ago due to the limitations on our technology. It’s really important that we keep abreast of these changes and brainstorm how you might use them, because if we don’t start now, we will be so unbelievably far behind when the truly revolutionary things happen.

Possible resources/uses of Internet video:

- sample recordings of professionals: have students re-create a video by a professional musician of their instrument, using an easier piece of music; how does it sound the same? Different?

- submit playing tests from home or wherever is most comfortable for the student

- record music videos to show some of the technical aspects of modern music recording and performance

- guest performances over YouTube/Skype by partner schools

Many possibilities here! Let me know of anything that might be usable!

Knowledge and Opinion

Here in Alberta, we just finished a provincial election. The campaign was hard-fought, with plenty of discussion on both policy and some of the nastier personal attacks that are typical of trench-fighting in government. Parties were accused variously of racism, elitism, incompetence, homophobia, and various other unsavoury ‘isms’.

Occasionally I mention big political events like this to students; not to give my own opinion, but to see how aware they are of their environment and what sort of thoughts they have about its future. You can also tell a lot about what their families think about given issues by their responses. Students younger than about 16 or so tend to share the opinions of their parents when it comes to things like politics and other controversial issues, just because they have less personal experience with the outcomes of such things, and so absorb the best second-hand information they can get, which they tend to view as their parents’ knowledge.

As I do this discussion with students, and even with various adults, I realize that there is a profound disconnect in our modern world between a vigorous opinion and actual knowledge. This goes hand in glove with the old admonition to not discuss politics or religion over the dinner table because no one agrees about it. It seems to me that people are most likely to have an overwhelmingly strong opinion in the area of something they have little knowledge in.

Take my early musical training and life as a less divisive example. I, like many other beginning ‘classical’ musicians, liked to turn my nose down at anything that wasn’t able to fit in my nice little box of tonal music. Rap? Yuck, that’s not music. Serialism? Don’t give me garbage like that. Bach? Ahh, that’s the stuff. Beethoven? Who DOESN’T like Beethoven.

I had relatively little experience and knowledge of the variety and differences of music outside of my own little-traveled box of opinion. I didn’t listen to things like rap, minimalism, or post-tonal stuff on a regular basis, but yet I was violently against them.

It was only once I was forced to study a wide variety of musical styles that I was able to say, “Okay, I might not LIKE this, but that has very little to due with its worthiness to be included in music.” In my haste to prove I had a sophisticated opinion, I exaggerated or made up a bunch of ideas about things I had little actual knowledge of so I didn’t have to do any painful confronting of reason.

People seem to do this with anything that might be remotely controversial. Politics, for instance. I have heard various opinions that certain parties in this past election were inherently racist, or sexist, or espousing dangerous ‘socialist’ ideas. The amount of evidence for any of these things tended to be based entirely on opinion, and not even opinion formed from original fact. Asking certain people what ‘socialism’ actually meant tended to elicit responses like ‘taxes’, which is possibly the least-productive definition of an ideology I have ever heard.

Confronting this with reason is very hard to do. People (myself included) love the feeling of being ‘in the right’. You ‘know’ something to be true in spite of the ‘incorrect’ opinions of others. It’s a great feeling. However, it’s also terrible for the progress of society. Masses of people with this mentality only encourage violent divisions with no recourse for common ground.

I don’t mean to say here that our politicians are all stupid and encourage division. They are masters of spin, implying things and taking stances based on what they think people want. It’s the fault of the community at large for being unwilling to compromise. The less you are willing to give on any issue, the more chance of someone being in violent disagreement with you. And once that argument starts, that other person is already too frustrated with you to ever compromise.

I think what it boils down to is that as much as we would love to have all citizens be equally well-informed and participating with the same level of dedication to the democratic process, there are situations where you ideally just have to say that you don’t know enough to have a discussion. People find this very hard, and I see why. However, I personally find that a lot easier than arguing for 6 hours with someone who uses opinions shared amongst family for years to cover for a gap in knowledge.

Oh, and in case all of this is my opinion and not actually realistic… well, I like to be right, so let me be deluded. At least until my wife tells me where I’m wrong.

Taking Apart Your Game

Musicians have a necessity to practice. Performance is our livelihood, and just like athletes, the muscles must continuously be trained in order to function at peak efficiency. Personal success and excellence is all a function of how much work (efficient, quality work) one puts into the practice.

Of course I don’t have the same need to practice this as many of my compatriots who I studied with at university because I am a teacher as well as a musician, and the security of my family doesn’t depend on whether I win my next big audition with a major group or snag a repeating gig. However, I live in a small enough city that I end up being near the top of professional musician ranks in my area, which means I have a need to keep up my skills to fulfill the local needs. I play things like musical theatre, workshops, etc., and all of those require me to maintain my proficiency.

Anyone who attempts to succeed at a performance discipline knows how critical it is to maintain their high-level skills. For example, I make a conscious effort to keep extending my range, increasing the speed of my articulations, and fine-tuning the intonations and peculiarities of the instruments I play. Something that gets said a lot in the practice room between coach/teacher and student, however, tends to get glossed over in real life. This is skill of keeping those fundamentals intact.

The high-level techniques are what land you jobs. Everyone is assumed to be able to produce good tone, intonation, and basic techniques of articulation and speed. The performers who land the jobs are the ones who excel. For many people breaking into the business, it can be easy to focus on doing some very ‘cool’ things at a high level. The guitarist wants to show how wickedly fast she can shred that solo, or the pianist wants to demonstrate his ability to keep up with Liszt’s strenuous handspan requirements at tempo. Those things are very important, and it’s equally important to keep adding more of those things and pushing them to new heights.

Sometimes, however, you have to start all over again from scratch. Human beings get wrapped up in leaving behind what you ‘know’ you’ve mastered. Think about grade school math classes. Once you ‘learn’ your multiplication facts, how many times do you end up going back to them and just studying/drilling them upon beginning trigonometry? The assumption is that once you know it, you know it.

Professional musicians, athletes, and even pro video game players are all very good at this hidden skill. Watch a brass player warm up for a set. Probably this warm-up begins with some long tones, gentle flexibility exercises, and scales at a moderate tempo. What is he doing this for? Obviously he doesn’t want to blow out his lips by starting with something too hard, but there’s a deeper purpose.

Whenever you want to progress to a new skill level, you have to make sure that your mastery of the fundamentals hasn’t slipped at all. The tiniest flaw in your breath control means you can’t sustain that new high note you’ve just solidified for very long. If you can’t articulate that speed scale clearly at a lower tempo, the illusion of clarity at higher speeds is just that – an illusion. This is often why you see professionals doing such easy stuff to warm up. It’s a lot like stretching, but keep in mind the purpose of stretching is not just to limber up the muscles. You’re practicing certain necessary motions and extensions in isolation so that the body functions correctly in context of much more difficult tasks.

You can apply this philosophy to almost anything you do. I’ve spoken before about the tendency to want to rush to the complex stuff and forgetting about taking it slow and easy. No matter what the task, whenever you want to excel, it’s like learning all over again.

The first step is to attend carefully to the most basic fundamentals. Solidify those.

Next, decide which fundamentals are involved in succeeding with the new skill. Practice those fundamentals again, making sure the body knows what ‘feels right’.

Combine the parts to form the new skill, but only at a slower/easier/less technical level. Make sure it can be done in complete isolation from other techniques at a lower level of difficulty.

Slowly ramp up to attain the level of proficiency desired. This is the step which is easiest to mess up. If you go too fast, you start losing out on fundamentals. Too, this step can take days, weeks, months, or years, depending on the skill and relative difficulty/level of proficiency. If you ever find yourself losing track, you have to come back a level and make sure you are not messing up any of the crucial fundamentals.

The underlying, hidden parts of performance are so crucial, but so difficult to see. Just remember the next time you see someone do something amazing that you could do it too; it just takes many, many hours of work and dedication to do it.

Another Political Aside

There’s a provincial election campaign running right now in Alberta. I won’t waste your time explaining the specifics, simply because if you live here, you’ve probably already decided whether or not you’re going to vote and someone like me won’t give you much help in clarifying things. Of course, if you don’t live here, you’re probably not interested in the provincial level of politics unless there’s a very specific issue you care about, in which case you know all about it already.

What I would like to know is why we keep getting nastier in our politics. It seems like in an era like this one, there’s so much information out there that any political entity should be able to get out their message adequately to anyone who wants it. Accordingly, it would be intuitive for democratically-elected governments to be elected on and run campaigns based on policy. Yet, increasingly I see American-style attack ads on TV and verbal rhetoric that is as close to offensive as possible without crossing to slander.

It’s not something that is unique to the provincial level; I’ve noticed it with Canada’s recent federal elections, as well as of course the ongoing labyrinth that is the American presidential race. Candidates are not elected based on whether they support higher taxes and increased social programs or broad tax cuts and hands-off government, but by how ‘nice’ and ‘trustworthy’ they can appear in spite of the opposition’s every attempt to paint them as an avatar of evil.

I realize that politics is the art of spinning information to your benefit, but the extent and kind of spin I see today makes me scratch my head in confusion. Surely people aren’t naive enough to vote for one politician on the basis that they have had the least negative press? It seems as if the name of the game is starting to be ‘make them look bad’ not ‘show how good a governor you will be’.

I think the general population is partially to blame for this. We’ve spent pretty much the entire human existence vilifying governments as being awful organizations that are only out for power and have none of our best interests at heart. Comedians, media people, and the average person out for a drink having a few jokes with friends: all of them make fun of how terrible politicians are. As a result, there’s this sort of widespread acceptance of the idea that one shouldn’t be picking the ‘best’ leader or ‘best’ party, but merely the least of all evils.

This seems to me to be such an awful way of viewing the world. Many people who go into politics really do want to make the world a better place. They absolutely disagree amongst each other because that’s what people do, but we can’t simply assume things will be bad. If governments are all bad no matter what, why do we still have things like schools being built, hospitals providing health care, roads maintained, and an economy that at least provides a large chunk of the population with a way to avoid starving? The race to form a government shouldn’t be some sort of bastardized version of a high school class president’s election, which basically turns into a popularity contest based on who has the best combination of good looks and a sense of humour.

We deserve better, but it won’t happen until you actually go out, do the research on the various parties, and decide which one’s policies actually represent your desires for government. If you voted for what you want done, rather than for whom you want to do it, you’ll probably get a better result.

And if someone wins who you don’t want to, don’t throw them under a bus just because you disagree with them. We can and should be better than that. It’s not a glamourous job, and it’s generally a thankless one. Let’s not encourage them to be any nastier than they already are.

It’s All An Illusion

Being a teacher, it’s my job to seem knowledgeable. Ideally, you should have students asking this question every so often: “Wow, it seems like you know everything. Is there anything you don’t know?” Obviously you don’t always manage to be teaching those things (I was in an esthetics classroom the other day – yikes), but students will trust you more if you are seldom wrong.

Of course, I come by this honestly in regards to music. Spend thousands of both dollars and hours on learning to read, play, listen to, and conduct music and one hopes you managed to internalize a few things. However, there’s lots of room for other topics that students will naturally be curious about that you can’t always prepare for with a university degree and dedicated study. So. How do you do it?

Read.

Here I don’t mean taking out large technical books from the library and memorizing the newest theory of quantum mechanics. I surf the Internet daily, and I read whatever catches my eye. There are several sites out there that collect all sorts of random news and events in different categories. In one day, I can go from following the latest in the American presidential campaign, to the current standing of my own province’s negotiations with the teachers’ union I belong to, to the most whimsical experiments with lasers in the world of science.

You would think that in an Internet-savvy era, where children have been brought up knowing a world where the Internet was ubiquitous, that students and colleagues alike would share this ease of access to information. There is the occasional student who knows exactly what I know from reading online and is able to comment on various world events. But by and large, the Internet to them is not about information, it’s about socializing. The rampant rise of social media has distracted many people from the other abilities the Internet has.

Don’t mistake me – the Internet’s ability to socially connect a group of people even at long distance is amazing. I can talk, joke, debate, or even play friendly games with someone halfway around the world in a heartbeat. However, the natural ease with which people say the next generation takes to the Internet is not a universal phenomenon.

Think of your own Internet usage. What percentage of that is spent reading something that isn’t related to a social interaction? You can probably cut that fraction in half or even less for the average young person today. And it makes sense! These individuals are trying to discover who they are, and the Internet allows them to try and find people who are just like them. It is also, however, a great tool for self-education.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m going to let the cat out of the bag the next time I’m asked.

“Sir, how come you know all that?”

“Teachers just know everything, Jimmy.”

Ah, the magic of the Internet. Now off to look at some amusing cat pictures…

Internet Personae

It’s very interesting the way that different people treat their voice on the Internet. Take, for example, WordPress. There are many thousands of blogs hosted through this service. If you open up a new window and glance through the ‘Freshly Pressed’ section of WordPress, or even search by topics, you’ll be hard pressed to find something that goes out of its way to specifically be hurtful and argumentative. Do they exist in the massive jungle of blogs? Probably, but they’re not immediately apparent to a casual visitor.

Now, contrast this with any discussion forum with a less-than-Inquisitorial level of moderator control. Within 3 comments, you will find someone making a flippant one or two word comment specifically designed to be amusing but not helpful. Within 10, you will find at least one comment making ad hominem attacks at either the author of the article or the person who crafted the thoughtful, well-written original post. By 20-30 comments, it is very likely that the 2 or 3 intelligent points of discussion have been shouted down by opinionated people who have nothing to contribute except dubious facts and expressions of how stupid the other posters/authors are being.

The question I always ask myself is: what’s the difference? Why are there so many people who blog civilly and discuss in the same manner even when disagreeing, when people can’t be bothered to be decent in the leaving of a 10 word comment on a discussion forum?

I think the answer (or at least a possible explanation) lies in another form of electronic interaction – Twitter.

Twitter gives you 140 characters (maximum) to make your point. Many of the issues that people like and need to talk about are complex and feature many opposing points of view. The 140 characters of each Twitter message necessitate two things: 1) a long and broken-up chain of connected Tweets to make a point; and 2) small statements that have absolutely zero context and no ability to convey tone. This I believe exemplifies the problem of online interaction.

With Twitter, the objective is actually to NOT contribute. Twitter’s purpose is not to let information be shared in a way that promotes meaningful discussion. Twitter is the electronic version of flashing one’s tailfeathers. It’s a digital neon sign saying, “Hey, world! Look at me!” With the ability to track followers by name and the ease of use that Twitter displays, it’s an attention contest, where winners are measured in “Number of people reading your Tweets who couldn’t care less about you as a person!” (Okay, that last statement is a BIT facetious – but I think it has certain merit)

We didn’t know what we were getting into when the Internet first hit it big (publicly speaking). Many people far more knowledgeable than I have compared the Internet to the Wild West, where there has been no law for the longest time. We were forced to evolve our online social code of conduct in a totally context-less environment, and now are living with the results. And with the rise of the social media empires, the result tends to be attention-mongering.

So we come back to the initial question, but with new qualifiers: if attention is being sought by so many, why then is the negative attention of a flame war more common than the positive attention of connecting with other bloggers/posters who either agree with you or can have civil discussions?

For me, I believe it comes down to human nature and laziness. People hate to be wrong. Understandable to a certain extent – you don’t want to be believing lies or be uneducated. But the problem is that on the Internet, without borders, barriers, or general rules of conduct like a Constitution, you have the ability to ONLY affirm your biases unless you choose to go somewhere where they may be shaken. This leads to a perception that since you can find something to agree with you, you must be right. After that, any effort that you would need to put in in order to disprove what you believe is just too much work (hence the laziness). And so it is that on the Internet people become full of self-righteousness and convinced of their own presumptions, and feel the need to shout down anyone who tries to shatter their careful illusions.

This is different when you start blogging. Blogging requires you to have some sort of hosting service and makes you available to many millions of people, all of whom have access to the same resources for creation that you do. If you are going to trumpet a bias, you will either be ignored or out-written by more competent and professional authors. Hence, the retreat to anonymous discussion forums, where you can flame and whine to your heart’s content with no real fear of anyone inflicting permanent Internet logic defeat on you for all to see, because the topic will die away soon and all the posters will move on to the next controversial article/tweet.

I see this all the time in classes. The sort of behaviour you see from trying to guide Grade 8 students in a discussion is exactly the same as the behaviour of your average everyday forum or Twitter argument. It’s as if the Internet frees us from our normal personae and allows us to just be socially inept children again, with no need to self-regulate or censor. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. I hope one day that racism and prejudice and hate will be just as punishable online as they are in real life, and that eventually the world as a whole will ‘grow up’ enough to realize that maybe spending hours of your time reverting to 13 years old online is not the best idea.

When that ‘growing up’ happens, I look forward to the discussions of the merits of social welfare versus a totally capitalist state without any of the acrimony that we see in the Internet today. You know. Just like it is in the real world today.

Okay, maybe a little bit of sarcasm.

Warming Up

One of the joyous things that greet you as a band teacher when you have students filter in for your class is the multiplicity of honks, squeaks, and blats that indicate your students have figured out that they should be warming up for practice. Of course, they’re also doing it wrong.

You see this problem quite often with a new practitioner of any complex performance task: warming up is where they rush immediately to the hard things that they know they have to work on. The thought process goes something like this: “I know we’re going to be working on <that thing> that I  find difficult, so I’ll just practice it ahead of time right now and be ready when we get there!” The inevitable result is that they still struggle to get it, and will probably continue to for a while. And they are also bound to wonder why that is.

Experienced musicians and athletes will understand this instinctively, of course, but it’s counter-intuitive. In order to perform the complex components of your art well, it is necessary to practice the most basic of techniques when you begin each day. It doesn’t matter if you have been playing for 3 days or 3 years: warming up with the very basics is always the correct choice.

In music, for example, some of the necessary components to your warm-up will probably include long tones for wind players, major or minor scales, slow to fast tonguing exercises, and gentle flexibility shifts that cover the whole playable range of the instrument that you possess currently. Each of these components can influence the performance of the most complex musical pieces in profound ways. For example, if you can’t play your scales (even slowly) as a warm-up, you probably will never truly master the impressive fast passages that are incorporated into so many cadenzas and flourishes.

As an even more direct example, here’s my general condensed warm-up routine:

1. ‘Six Notes’ Exercise: the link here is to an excellent article written about the originator of this exercise that any musician (in particular, obviously, trombone players) should take a look at. The idea of this exercise is to slowly refine the articulation and breath attacks of your notes so that you always start notes correctly and with proper breath support. You play a series of chromatic pitches, from F3-Bb4, and then descending from F3-C3, using hard, soft, and finally no tongue attacks on each note. This is done slowly so as to give the brain time to perceive the time and accuracy of beginning the pitch.

2. Flexibility/long tones: there are a couple of choices here. It’s good to have slight variations from day to day so that the brain is kept active. Here I generally play either slow ascending lip slurs or a series of staggered rising and lowering pitches for long durations at slow speeds. This works simulaneously on breath control and extremes of range at either end of the pitch spectrum. It’s vital to do this slowly so you can maximize your breath.

3. Lip slurs: These I do in a middle register to avoid range difficulties, and practice slurring in fourths (for example, from Bb 4 down to F3, then descending chromatically) in first eighth-notes, then triplets, then sixteenths, then triplet-sixteenths, and if I am feeling good, all the way down to thirty-second notes.

4. Scales: I do all major AND all minor scales (melodic) through at least 2 octaves; this can obviously change as you have time. The important thing is to do these at a moderate speed so that you are letting muscle memory direct you and play it smoothly, without hitching or misplacing a note. This can be done in one or two octaves OR even throughout the full range of the instrument for ambitious people.

5. Tonguing: very simple sixteenth and triplet-sixteenth double and triple tonguing exercises are the norm here. I don’t make it complex: a scale with repeated notes followed by fast scales in that tonguing mode is usually enough to make me feel prepared.

6. Excerpts: as a semi-professional musician, there are a number of standard orchestral excerpts that you simply HAVE to know, in case of auditions. Trombone players must master the ‘Bolero’ and ‘Requiem’ solos, for example. I usually finish off my warm-up with two or three of these to test whether or not my facial muscles and breathing are aligned and in working order.

This is a cycle that I repeat whenever I practice, the goal of which, you may have noticed, is not to stress the limits of my range in and of itself. Neither is it to practice the difficult in advance. The main goal here is to get the mind and body so comfortable with the fundamentals of ALL good playing that when something more difficult comes along, I just breeze through it because of the excellent basic technique I’m already using.

It also has the secondary effect of creating a calm, serene, and prepared mental space for me. Trying to warm up with complex and challenging repertoire generates this expectation of difficulty that infringes on your ability to play even the easy material. In fact, since I do this every day, I can even condense this further and play only two of the exercises and still feel prepared, because my brain associates them with comfort.

For students this is especially valuable. If they can learn to warm up as a class with a long, extended routine that lets them all be prepared, they can then trim it down to two very short routines to begin the day and be ready to go. Part of my job is to try and model that with directed warm-ups at the beginning of class, but the temptation is still to play the cool, hard stuff to begin. Beginners just fail to realize that if you can’t play the easy basic stuff, there’s no way the hard stuff will be of good quality.

It’s a lot like teaching, actually. If they can’t write a sentence correctly, there’s no way you’re getting a quality essay out of the student. Teach the fundamentals first, and worry about complex beauty later.